Writing the Cosmopolitan Imagination                              

genre transactions in world-literary space

Research and exchange project with the University of Delhi (2016-2020)                                                                  

Writing the Cosmopolitan Imagination is a bilateral research and exchange network involving the Departments of English and German at the University of Potsdam and at the University of Delhi. The program is funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the University Grants Commission (UGC) for a period of four years from 2016 to 2020.

Writing the Cosmopolitan Imagination conjoins three research themes that are crucially relevant in current literary and cultural studies: It links the discussion of an emergent transnational ‘world literature’ with contemporary debates over cosmopolitanism, planetarity and global citizenship as well as with the recent turn towards genre as an inherently social dimension of literature. By bringing these three dimensions together, the collaboration project aims to reassess and productively investigate in a sustained bilateral dialogue the ways in which literature contributes to the articulation of identities in the globalization process, in which imagined communities have acquired transnational and cosmopolitan dimensions: People increasingly “think and feel beyond the nation and hence inhabit imagined worlds that exceed but certainly not fully supersede clear-cut national or local affiliations. Writing the Cosmopolitan Imagination takes this observation as the starting point for collaborative international research of the role that literature plays in the bringing-forth of such transnational imagined worlds. 

Writing the Cosmopolitan Imagination comprises the following measures:

·       individual research projects by PhD and postdoctoral researchers in English or German Studies;

·       reciprocal faculty members’ exchange including the teaching of seminars at the host university;

·       reciprocal students’ exchange including extensive students' excursions to Delhi and Potsdam/Berlin;

·       summer and winter schools at both partner institutions;

·       an international conference with publication of proceedings;

·       guided students’ project work;

·       development of a joint module with an e-learning component;

·       joint PhD supervision where applicable.

For more information, click here.